Faculty Profile: American modernism as redefined by Wanda
Corn

She was enthroned on a grand chair
in her adobe studio on the secluded ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico.
Known for her still lifes of bleached desert bones and skulls,
Georgia O'Keeffe had an equally legendary reputation as a remote
artist-priestess.

Wanda Corn, perched on a small stool
at the foot of the icon, could hear the ticking of a nearby clock.
She had been granted a 30-minute interview but it was stretching
into an hour.

Suddenly O'Keeffe stood up,
signaling that the questioning had come to an end. As they walked
to the door together, the 93-year-old artist nudged
Corn.

Wanda Corn peers from a
window in her office at the Palo Alto home she and her husband, Joe
Corn, bought from painter Sam Francis. The artist had converted the
former auto body shop into loft-style living space with a studio
when the Corns bought the property.

Photos: L.A.
Cicero

"She had a twinkle in her eye," Corn
recalls. "And she said to me, 'You didn't learn anything today that
you didn't know before, did you?'"

Corn had read everything she could
about O'Keeffe and had to agree that she hadn't heard anything new
or startling.

"But I said to her, 'You know what?
It's all in the teller, and listening to you make choices about
which stories to tell me and what to emphasize has made all the
difference.'"

As a nationally recognized historian
of American art and something of a storyteller herself, Corn knows
a definitive anecdote when she hears one. For decades she has been
listening to and decoding the artistic and cultural cross-currents
that circled in and out of early 20th-century American art, and she
offers up the findings of her research and teaching in a
provocative new book.

Published by the University of
California Press, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and
National Identity, 1915-1935, takes its title from O'Keeffe,
who liked to say that everyone in the 1920s was chasing after "the
Great American Thing." Relying on 300 full-color illustrations to
help make her points, Corn argues that after World War I artists in
New York and Paris began to agitate for a new national art, one
that was recognizably modern and American. In her revisionist
history, Corn explores how the "moderns," as she calls them, began
to claim the skyscrapers, billboards, brand-name products,
factories, jazz, advertisements and even plumbing fixtures of the
1920s as identifiers of the new "Americanness."

Ocean liners were making
transatlantic travel more comfortable and accessible in that era,
and Corn writes that "this book demonstrates the almost balletic
intercontinental dance of artists' sailing in and out of the ports
of Le Havre and New York, heading from one continent to the other,
that makes the period so fascinating and distinguishes it from any
time before or after."

When she interviewed O'Keeffe in
1980, Corn was panning for the kinds of sparkling nuggets that
illuminate her portraits of six influential artists -- Marcel
Duchamp, Gerald Murphy, Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth, Charles
Sheeler and O'Keeffe -- whose careers provide the organizational
structure for The Great American Thing. Corn launches each
chapter with a close look at a single work by one of the artists,
and that piece becomes the central hub for discussions of cultural
dynamics that radiate in and out like spokes on a spinning
wheel.

A '24/7' professor,
Corn always makes time for her duties as chair of the Panel on
Outdoor Art.

"It's a book about discourses, as
opposed to single artists," Corn says. "A discourse at any given
time has many different proponents and they may not all be talking
to one another, or even know of one another, but they are all
addressing a common set of cultural issues and
problems."

Given those issues, it's not
surprising that The Great American Thing was years in the
writing.

"I drafted and redrafted, trying to
get to a point where I was happy with the complexity of thought and
also happy with the simplicity of expression," Corn says. "I work
very hard at what I do, and it isn't as if it came spontaneously to
me."

Corn has been situating American art
on the map with the great works of Europe since the 1960s, when she
put herself through graduate school at New York University's
Institute of Fine Arts by working for Gallery Passport. As a paid
tour guide, she helped visitors understand abstract and pop art
exhibitions by force of her analysis and contagious enthusiasm, and
those qualities continue to attract the admiration of scholars in
the field.

"Wanda has led a generation of
American scholars into serious and important research on American
art," says Elizabeth Turner, curator for early 20th-century art at
the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. "She is, quite simply,
my hero, and her book is a definitive study of what it means to be
American. I think it will be important in classrooms and salons for
a long time to come."

Corn cruises through East Coast
museums as often as she can, to keep up with important new shows.
One of the drawbacks of living in California, she says, is "how far
we are from the Amtrak art line, which goes from Washington to
Boston."

Continental divide notwithstanding,
Bryan Wolf, chair of the American studies program at Yale,
describes Corn as a "national resource."

"Over the past 20 years, there have
been two central figures in American art history -- Jules Prown at
Yale on the East Coast, who was 'Mr. American Art History,' and
Wanda Corn at Stanford on the West Coast, who is 'Ms. American Art
History,'" Wolf says. "Wanda has become a central senior figure in
ways that are far more extensive than her scholarship and
publishing. In fact, she has been the teacher, the
mentor, the organizer."

Corn came to Stanford in 1980 as the
university's first full-time appointment in the history of American
art. By Fall Quarter 1989, she was wearing two hats -- as head of
the art department and as acting director of the Stanford Museum.
When the Loma Prieta earthquake rumbled across the campus and shut
down the museum, Corn donned a third -- hard -- hat and took
charge of developing a feasibility study for a renovated museum and
searching for a permanent director.

"Having Wanda in place, who was
known to the staff and administration and who was highly respected
and well liked, was so important in the work that followed over the
next two years," says Mona Duggan, associate director for external
relations at the Cantor Arts Center. "She was able to gather the
support needed to ensure that the university approved moving ahead
with rebuilding the museum and with the director's
search."

Corn also served a term as director
of the Humanities Center, where she oversaw the restoration of the
annex and garden.

"With no offense to other past
directors, Wanda wins hands-down the award for 'Best Dressed
Director,'" says Susan Sebbard, administrator of fellowships and
stewardship at the Humanities Center. "Her mix of color, stripes
and whimsy in clothing and jewelry was a daily delight. And her
ability to blend serious, down-to-earth attention to the business
at hand with compassion and humor lifted everyone around
her."

A scholar of late 19th- and early
20th-century painting and photography, Corn currently is interim
chair of the Department of Art and Art History, where a sign on her
desk, a gift from a friend, confirms she is "A Chair Called Wanda."
She has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned
Societies and the National Museum of American Art, and she was the
first art historian appointed to the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars. Corn also has been a Regents Fellow at the
Smithsonian Institution, served two terms as director of the
College Art Association and been a commissioner of the National
Museum of American Art. During the 1984-85 academic year, she
criss-crossed the country, teaching on eight different campuses as
a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar.

Corn has curated numerous
exhibitions at Bay Area and national museums, and authored books
and catalogs that include The Color of Mood: American Tonalism
1890-1910, The Art of Andrew Wyeth and Grant Wood:
The Regionalist Vision. As a result of organizing several
different Grant Wood exhibitions, Corn became friends with the
artist's sister, who gave her a copy of the outfit in which she had
posed for American Gothic. Corn and her husband, Joe, a
senior lecturer in history, often turn up at parties dressed as the
dour Midwestern couple, and Joe has even constructed a collapsible
Masonite pitchfork that he can pack in his suitcase and take on
travel-study trips for the Stanford Alumni Association.

In 1998 Wanda Corn received the
Richard W. Lyman Award for faculty volunteer service from the
Alumni Association, which hailed "the boldness, wit and clarity she
serves up from the podium as celebrant, interpreter and evangelist
for her field, and as a guide to students of all ages and
perspectives."

Those who have taken Corn's popular
"Transatlantic Modernism" class have their own favorite memories of
the salon that closes that course. Held at the Corns' Palo Alto
home, a former auto-body shop that's been reborn as a
6,000-square-foot SoHo artist's loft space, the soiree is conducted
by Gertrude Stein herself, a.k.a. Corn in brown corduroy and
commanding brooch.

Students dress as characters from
Stein's artistic world -- Picasso, Matisse, the writer Carl Van
Vechten or the painter Florine Stettheimer -- and serve up futurist
hors d'oeuvres of whipped egg whites with yolks floating in the
middle. To be admitted to the salon, students must come with
modernist portraits created for the occasion. One year a plunger
was awarded "In Advance of a Broken Toilet" for a particularly
witty portrait of Duchamp.

Not coincidentally, the first
chapter of Corn's new book opens with a discussion of a
controversial Duchamp work -- Fountain, a porcelain urinal
the artist submitted in 1917 for installation at the exhibition of
the Society of Independent Artists.

"Fountain is so 'out there'
as a work of art, and Duchamp has to be one of the most heavily
written about artists," Corn says. "I was worried that someone
might say, 'My god, not another essay on the urinal! What more can
there be to say?'"

The new perspective Corn brought to
Duchamp's work was to suggest that he was a modern-day Tocqueville,
continuing the tradition of French visitors to America who have
reported on their travels in and impressions of the upstart nation.
Writing about the artist's "wit and intellectual skepticism," Corn
notes: "Duchamp's iconoclasm in making Fountain, I want to
suggest, was not just that of a jester and conceptualist, but also
that of a teacher."

Ellen Todd, an associate professor
of art history at George Mason University, likens Corn's influence
as a teacher to an energizing force field. Todd was a graduate
student at Stanford developing a dissertation topic on Picasso the
year Corn arrived.

"The real 'aha' for me was the
social history of art that Wanda introduced me to," says Todd, who
also teaches women's studies and cultural studies. "After a 10-week
[course], I defected from Picasso to Reginald Marsh and his urban
cohorts, and to a social/feminist history of art. It was the best
thing I ever did in my intellectual career."

Corn's career had taken a similar
flip the year she left Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where she
had been majoring in history, to study abroad. At the University of
London she enrolled in University College, the Slade School of Art
and then Birkbeck College, where she took up art history and
studied with Nikolaus Pevsner, a renowned scholar of medieval
cathedrals.

"I had grown up next door to the
Congregational church where my father was the minister, so I was
very comfortable in churches," Corn recalls. "In England I was
surrounded by all these marvelous cathedrals, and I went with
Pevsner on field trips to take measurements and to try to discover
the little seams that marked the places where one work period
stopped and another picked up. He was an inspiration to me, and I
fell in love with things medieval and thought that would be what I
would spend my life doing."

In Paris the following year, Corn
worked as an au pair for a family with four children to
absorb the French she would need for additional studies. She also
used the time to hitchhike back and forth across the
continent.

"Frankly, those were my
Wanderjahre [journeyman years] and I wanted to see and do
all I could. My family was such that once you had made a long
journey like that -- man, you worked it for all you could. I
wouldn't have dreamed of making a phone call home because of the
expense, so for two years I was on my own and made a lot of good
friends and learned very domestic French."

When Corn returned to the States to
finish her undergraduate degree at New York University, Joe was
waiting for her. They had met at Bates and corresponded regularly
while she was away.

The couple were married within a
year and Joe taught at a prep school in Westchester County while
Wanda commuted by train to graduate school.

Then along came Erastus Salisbury
Field.

Corn's parents had restored a
parsonage in Westerfield that dated from 1832, and in the course of
furnishing it with period pieces, they had found two anonymous
paintings. A professor from Amherst College spotted the portraits
on a spring house tour and identified them as the work of Field, a
19th-century itinerant artist who had worked up and down the
Connecticut River valley.

The first exhibition of Field's work
was held at the Connecticut Historical Society while Corn was
attending the Institute of Fine Arts.

"It was fascinating," she recalls of
her experience in the gallery that day. "Here was an unknown hand
to which a whole career could now be ascribed because people had
used skills of connoisseurship and historical research.

"As a side interest, I began to read
in American art, and before I knew it, it seemed more relevant to
my life and nowhere near as worked-over as medieval art. And a
number of us at school began to think that American art was a very
interesting subset of European art."

When Joe Corn was accepted to the
doctoral program in history at the University of
California-Berkeley, the couple headed West. Wanda taught first at
Cal and then spent 10 years at Mills College, where she taught
courses in European and American art and photography. In 1980 she
and Joe were recruited to Stanford.

"Here I was allowed to really
indulge and specialize," Wanda says. "I was thrilled to be given an
opportunity to actually create a program in American
art."

When she is asked about the
influence of her own professors, Corn says that one former
instructor liked to muse about how Parisian cubism was disseminated
and absorbed by other artists. Art historians agree that cubism was
birthed in the studios of Picasso and Braque, but her professor
wanted to know how it got to England, Germany and America -- and
why it looked a bit different in each of those
countries.

"Posing the question that way,
suggesting there was an American cubism, as opposed to a French
cubism, made me wonder what made it American," Corn says. "I wasn't
satisfied with the answer I got then -- that Americans were
pragmatic, hard-nosed, not very philosophical people, so their
cubism was more realist and harder edged. I found that answer
weird, because I knew many Americans who wouldn't fit those
definitions, and it became an interesting problem to
me."

To illustrate her evolving concept
of the transatlantic defining of Americanness in the early 20th
century, Corn takes a piece of paper and draws a series of
overlapping circles on it.

"We can talk about those who thought
there were indigenous American forms of advertising and those who
argued for similar American qualities in local factory design," she
says, tracing the circles. "And then, over here, you have artists
beginning to talk to one another about what America ought to look
like in its modern art."

Corn often finds answers to the
questions that animate her scholarly interest in work outside the
academy. For the past eight years, she has served as a member of
the advisory board of the Georgia O'Keeffe Catalogue
Raisonné, a two-volume compilation of every known work
by the artist that was published last fall by Yale University
Press. Corn was invited to give a lecture to patrons of the
California Palace of the Legion of Honor to open "Georgia O'Keeffe:
The Poetry of Things," a traveling exhibition that will be on view
through May 14. She also will talk about O'Keeffe's work at 5:30
p.m. Thursday, April 6, in Annenberg Auditorium.

Corn suggested at the Legion of
Honor that in addition to being a member of the first generation of
modernists, O'Keeffe was a teacher in a profound way. As she showed
slides of the artist's serial paintings of Penitente crosses,
Jack-in-the-pulpit flowers and clam shells, Corn argued that
O'Keeffe was trying to teach viewers how a simple motif can be
transformed through modernist rhetoric.

"She's giving you the gift of
watching a modern artist's mind at work," Corn said. "It's never
the motif she wants us to see. What she's most interested in
showing us is how the artist can look at an ordinary door time and
again and constantly reinvent it and transform it in
paint.

"She's showing us that America could
never be whole without its artists -- its special, insightful
seers." SR